In recent years, several applications have been developed that rely on timely and effective interactions between two or more elements of a communication network. For example, in the sphere of online gaming, hundreds or thousands of game clients executing on user machines may be interacting with a central server executing on a networked computer. With such an architecture, a game server program is frequently tasked with providing content to clients, receiving client requests, processing those requests, responding to those requests, and synchronizing those requests with the requests of other clients. One factor that can affect the server programs ability to timely respond to client requests is the speed at which the server program can be notified that it has received data from the client, and the speed with which the data can be provided to the server program. One conventional method is for the server program to periodically poll the network stack of the server operating system to determine if data has been received. However, this method can take an undesirable amount of time, resulting in an undesirable delay in the server program responding to client requests. Furthermore, the speed at which a client program can be notified that it has received data from the server, and the speed with which the data can be provided to the server program can also cause undesirable delay. Similar problems can occur in peer-to-peer networks, resulting in undesirable delays in communications between programs at computer devices in the peer-to-peer network.
In the gaming context, this can result in distracting events such as game freezes, stuttering, warping, etc. As such, a need exists for an improved processing system and method that manages received data.